Sound or Silence?

Despite my best efforts, I'm struggling to manage to get the opportunity to try animating to sound. It's a whole new sea I have to be willing to dive into, which seems pretty daunting after realising the potential of after effects and basic different ways of animating in the first place. I've also started to notice that the credits of animations usually list the animator and someone else who has done all of the sounds, suggesting that the animators just stick to what they do, and leave the sound guys to do what they do.
But of course, I want to take it all on and find out more anyway - I still think it's really useful to get a basic understanding of what the fundamental things are in what you are interested in, and in my case, sound is a pretty important slice of what makes an animation, so therefore I should at least know a little about it.
I came across Designing Sound for Animation by Robin Beauchamp and checked that it's available at the library, so for a future read beyond this brief I'll be taking this out and having a good read through to get some ideas and understanding of what I'm missing out on with my, so far, silent animations.